Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
Jerry should be getting ready to sign books in London about now as part of the lead up to his talk for the British Humanists, but for those not in the UK but in my vicinity, I will be giving a Darwin Day talk tomorrow, February 13, at 2 PM, at the Kenosha Public Museum in Kenosha, Wisconsin. My talk will be “What Darwin Did for Biology”, on what the key puzzles in natural history were, how Darwin solved them with a unified explanation, and how this led to the rise of such modern disciplines as ecology, genetics, and geology, and, somewhat paradoxically, to the divisions among these disciplines. The Darwin Day events at the Museum run 10 AM to 4 PM, although I don’t know what the full schedule is. It’s also an excellent chance to see the “Dinosaurs Take Flight: The Art ofArchaeopteryx” exhibit. For those who’ve been to past Darwin Days in Kenosha, this year it’s at the main Public Museum, not the Dinosaur Discovery Museum. If you arrive early, I’ll be across the street at Ashling’s having a bloody Mary at noon– stop by and say hello.
Richard ‘Dick’ Levins, the John Rock Professor of Population Sciences at the Harvard School of Public Health, died on January 19 of this year. He was one of the most influential population biologists of the 20th century, and a close colleague and associate of Dick Lewontin, Jerry’s doctoral advisor.
Richard Levins, 1930-2016
Levins was an early and active participant in the group of biologists that, in the early 1960s, worked to unite ecology, evolutionary biology, and genetics into a unified and theoretically-rich science of the biology of populations. Included among this group was Dick Lewontin, Larry Slobodkin, E.O. Wilson, and, perhaps most saliently for Levins, Robert MacArthur.
Both Levins and MacArthur were skilled in mathematical theory, and both wanted to develop a unified, general, and realistic theory of ecology and evolution. They collaborated on a number of seminal papers, and Levins (1966) wrote an important exposition and defense of the style of modeling that he and MacArthur favored, and which proliferated throughout population biology. The self-conscious unification of ecology and evolutionary biology in which Levins participated was an important event in the history of the field, but it has received little attention from historians. Sharon Kingsland touches on it in her Modeling Nature, but the most extensive treatment I know of is in E.O. Wilson’s memoir, Naturalist (though see note below.)
Wilson had a spectacular falling out with Levins and Lewontin in the 70s, so other accounts would be welcome. Some flavor of the movement, its goals, and participants, can be found in the 1968 symposium volume Population Biology and Evolution, edited by Lewontin, which included contributions by Levins, MacArthur, and Slobodkin, and which was favorably reviewed by Wilson in Science.
Though both Levins and MacArthur were accomplished theoreticians, both also had a natural-historical side (MacArthur, famously, “really knew his warblers“), and it is in fact Levins’ empirical side that first attracted my attention. Levins had a farm in Puerto Rico, and later was professor at the University of Puerto Rico. While there, he had a collaboration of many years with Harold Heatwole, documenting the biogeography of the biota of Puerto Rico and the nearby Virgin Islands, which involved substantial field work.
Levins was most interested in the insects, while Heatwole is a herpetologist. As Heatwole put it, this field work taught Dick “to love ants for themselves.” (There is no good online list of Levins’ papers, but those written with Heatwole are listed at the latter’s website.)Their 1981 paper with Michael Byer is rich in data and modestly synthetic, with a good bibliography. Their work was of great interest to me, as my dissertation field work was concentrated in the Virgin Islands, and my 2012 paper cited below is basically an update of the herpetological data parts of their 1981 paper.
But there was also one important theoretical paper, “On the distribution of organisms on islands”, that came out of their island collaboration. Published in 1963 in the Caribbean Journal of Science, it contains, in capsule form, the equilibrium theory of island biogeography, deriving the species species richness of an island biota from the balance of extinction and colonization.
This is of course, the theory made famous by, and now universally associated with, MacArthur and Wilson, who also first published on it in 1963, but in the more prestigious journal Evolution. The Levins and Heatwole paper has been almost universally overlooked. (Ilkka Hanski and I have cited it.) This could be a lesson in choosing your publication outlets wisely, but, in fairness to MacArthur and Wilson, their paper was more comprehensive, and explored more ramifications. Given the close connections among Levins and the latter two, it would be interesting to know how the ideas developed so as to result in near simultaneous publication of the same basic idea.
Levins did later develop some of the theory from his and Heatwole’s paper into the theory of metapopulations, which looks at a species’ distribution over a region as a “population of populations”– some populations going extinct, while new ones form by colonization, leading to a dynamic landscape of the species’ presence and absence. In fact, the basic metapopualtion model is to this day called the “Levins Model”.
When I was a graduate student, including doing some work in Lewontin’s lab in the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Levins had students based with Lewontin at the MCZ, but, being across the Charles River at the School of Public Health himself, I rarely saw him, and never discussed with him either his field work in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, or the circumstances surrounding the development and publication of his and Heatwole’s version of the equilibrium theory of island biogeography, a failing which, to this day, I regret.
Levins was a lifelong communist, which was evident in his activities with groups such as Science for the People, and his affinity for Cuba and North Vietnam. I could not detect any hint of his political philosophy in his biological work, but John Maynard Smith, perhaps the greatest British evolutionary biologist of the second half of the 20th century, and himself an ex-Marxist who became disillusioned by communism, thought otherwise:
Levins was a Marxist before he was a biologist, and all his work shows it. His book Evolution in a Changing Environment, although it avoids the usual jargon, is the work of a conscious Marxist. I also think that it was a major contribution to ecology…. It is perhaps ironic that he made extensive use of mathematical techniques borrowed from capitalist economic theory: I cannot criticise because I have done the same. Since that time, he has worked more on applications of ecological theory. The essays in this book [The Dialectical Biologist] on pesticides, on Latin community health, and on applied biology in the Third World, reflect these interests. They illustrate the power of Marxism in the right hands. I have long thought of Levins as a rare example of a scientist whose work has been strengthened by adherence to a philosophy – Marxism or any other – and this book has confirmed that view.
Like Ernst Mayr before him– a synthesist of an earlier generation– Levins was able to participate in a symposium and celebration of his life’s achievements– “The Truth is the Whole”– organized at Harvard by his colleagues and students in the year before his death. Reminiscences by a number of his colleagues have been posted at the symposium website.
Dick Levins in Maricao, Puerto Rico, in the early 1950s (from radicalismojudio.org).
Heatwole, H. R. Levins and M.D. Byer. 1981. Biogeography of the Puerto Rican Bank. Atoll Research Bulletin 251. pdf
Kingsland, S. 1985. Modeling Nature. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Levins, R. 1966. The strategy of model building in population biology. American Scientist 54:421-431. pdf
Levins, R. 1968. Evolution in Changing Environments. Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J.
Levins, R. and H. Heatwole. 1963. On the distribution of organisms on islands. Caribbean Journal of Science 3:173-177.
Levins, R. and R.C. Lewontin. 1985. The Dialectical Biologist. Harvard University press, Cambridge, Mass.
Levins, R., and R.H. MacArthur. 1966. The maintenance of genetic polymorphism in a spatially heterogeneous environment: variations on a theme by Howard Levene. American Naturalist 100:585–589.
Lewontin, R.C., ed. 1968. Population Biology and Evolution. Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, N.Y.
MacArthur, R.H., and R. Levins. 1967. The limiting similarity, convergence and divergence of coexisting species. American Naturalist 101:377–385.
Mayer, G.C. 2012. Island lists of West Indian amphibians and reptiles. Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. Bulletin of the Florida Museum of Natural History 51:136-147. pdf
Maynard Smith, J. 1986. Molecules are not enough [review of The Dialectical Biologist]. London Review of Books 8(2):8-9. link
Wilson, E.O. 1994. Naturalist. Warner Books, New York.
Wilson, E.O. 1969. The new population biology [review of Population Biology and Evolution]. Science 163:1184-1185.
* N.B. This book– Slack, N.G. 2010. G. Evelyn Hutchinson and the Invention of Modern Ecology. Yale University Press, New Haven, Conn.– may treat this important episode: Hutchinson was MacArthur’s thesis advisor, but I have not read it.
After the U.S. Supreme Court in 1987 struck down creation science in public schools as unconstitutional, intelligent design gained popularity as an alternative to the study of conventional evolutionary biology. The Discovery Institute, a public policy think tank founded in 1991, explicitly seeks to champion intelligent design in academia.
However, according to its Social Principles, The United Methodist Church does not see conflict between faith in God and the study of biological evolution.
General Conference in 2008 approved a resolution “opposing the introduction of any faith-based theories such as Creationism or Intelligent Design into the science curriculum of our public schools.” The commission cited the resolution specifically in declining the Discovery Institute’s exhibit application.
The Methodists also cited the Dover case as showing that, as ruled by Judge John Jones III, ID isn’t science:
Jory Weintraub, an immunologist who teaches with the Duke Initiative for Science and Society at United Methodist-related Duke University, said the overwhelming majority of the scientific community agrees with the judge’s assessment.
Because intelligent design starts with belief in a designer, who as Jesus said should not be put to the test, it doesn’t offer testable hypotheses the way evolutionary biology does.
Well, even the DI notes that ID does offer testable hypotheses, so the Methodists are off the mark here. However, lest the DI take this out of context, all their testable hypotheses have failed. We have plausible precursors for the adaptations that the IDers claim could never have evolved in a stepwise fashion, and the supposed fossil evidence against Darwinian evolution has been attacked and refuted by real paleontologists (see here).
The DI, of course, which has no positive scientific program of its own, offering only lame and incorrect criticisms of real science, is into big-time whining, and so urges its acolytes to contact the Methodist Church:
Is human life just flotsam cast up by a mindless material process? That, the picture of what man is, constitutes the ultimate question posed by the study of evolution. Without regard for what is merely politically correct, Americans want to know what science has to say about biological origins.
The “leadership” of the UMC Commission, isolated from mainstream opinion, is thus this year’s COTY. They deserve it, whoever they are. The award is an occasion for sensible members of that church, and other thoughtful people of any religious persuasion or none, to rise up in protest. We have already offered an easy way of taking action. If you haven’t already, please spare a moment and do so.
The DI casts this as a free-speech issue. But if the Methodists’ position is that the Church must be accept science as it comes from scientists, then the DI has no right to promulgate its falsified “science” at a Church conference. That would be equivalent to allowing tables on homeopathy, ESP, and flat-earth “theory” at their meeting.
Now I could criticize the Church’s argument that there’s no conflict between science and faith, and I have, but I have a book on that, so I’ll leave it be. But it’s telling that the Discovery Institute, but no real scientific organization, whines continuously about being suppressed and censored. That’s also a hallmark of pseudoscientists like Deepak Chopra and Rupert Sheldrake. Have the woolheads at the DI ever noticed that similarity?
Reader Otto Nieminen sent some arthropods, including a very weird arachnid (third and fourth photos):
The spider is in all probability a Nephila inaurata inaurata (the red-legged golden orb-web spider) and was pictured in Zanzibar, Tanzania when I travelled there in 2007. The Nephila genus is a bit of a mess (what spider genus isn’t 😀 ) so perhaps best just to say Nephila sp. if you do decide to post it.
The hempitera is some Spilostethus sp. as far as I can tell (but Lygaeidae family seems fairly certain) that I pictured in Petra, Jordan just last year. I love archaeology and it was fantastic to visit Petra, but I did take time to picture any animals as well that I could find.
And finally, since it’s not wildlife but my pet, it might not qualify but I have a pet amblypygi in this link. The species is Damon diademaand it is found in east Africa, Kenya and Tanzania. These are some of the most fascinating arachnids I know of: they lack venom, their first pair of legs have evolved to become antennae-like feelers. They hunt by using their first pair of legs to position the prey close to their pedipalps so they can catch and hold it while having their noms. Amblypygis are usally very shy animals and prefer to hide so it was amazing to see it actually hunting. The poor cricket had about 0,01 seconds to live after this picture was taken.
Here’s a photo of one from Wikipedia:
Kiwi reader Clive Thorp sent photos of a bird endemic to New Zealand:
I told my neighbour Clive about your “Reader’s wildlife photographs” and suggested we submit his kererū (New Zealand Native Woodpigeon, Hemiphaga novaeseelandiae) photos. They were taken in his garden in Kelburn in suburban Wellington New Zealand.
This news had now become public courtesy of the Guardian, so I guess I can announce it here. On the day I arrived in Oxford (Saturday), Richard suffered a minor stroke at his home, which caused some temporary paralysis on one side but left his cognitive functions and speech intact. It was mild and caught early, so he’s expected to make a full recovery. Several of us have heard from him via an audio message, and although he sounds a bit tired, you wouldn’t know from his voice that anything was amiss. He’s at home and being well taken care of by Lalla.
Needless to say, he’ll have to cancel his appearance as moderator of my Darwin Day talk tonight (my old friend Steve Jones will be filling in), as well as the other Darwin Day talk in Nottingham and his upcoming tours of Australia and New Zealand. Join me in wishing him well. If you’re going to have a stroke, this is about the mildest form you can have, and I’m delighted that the prognosis is for a full recovery.
Good morning and Happy Friday to all! Grania here again. Professor Ceiling Cat is wending his way to London for his talk later this afternoon, so I am on Hili Dialogue duty this morning. He will of course check in with us later.
It is Darwin Day today (of course) so perhaps we should start with this quote from his On the Origin of Species:
“There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
Over in Poland today, Hili is still on her eternal vigilant watch for the turning of the seasons.
A: Where are you going?
Hili: On the roof to see whether Spring is visible yet.
In Polish:
Ja: A ty gdzie się wybierasz?
Hili: Na dach, zobaczyć, czy widać już wiosnę.
And as a little lagniappe, Taskin sent us in a lovely photo of a “catnip infused” Gus. Some of us certainly know how to enjoy life!
Today’s a quiet day in North Hinksey (Oxford), as I stay at home, work on my talk, rest, and do a few posts. For lunch my host took me to the Fishes, a local “gastropub”, which is what happens when rich locals take over the pub. The prices go up and the traditional accoutrements of the pub disappear. But they still have well-kept real ale, and the food is good.
Inside: only two real ales on tap. I went for Morland’s Old Speckled Hen, a local brew and a creditable pint, although a wee bit too cold:
A good pint is a lovely thing, with a small, creamy head, and golden as the afternoon light shines through it:
Lunch: I went for sausages again, this time venison sausages with mash, watercress (again), and, to satisfy the captious reader of yesterday, two fried onion rings.
Genteel British ladies in the gastropub. Not a pint among them—they went for wine.
Cartoonist Dave Brown of the Independent (papers are in the pub) gives a Brit’s-eye-view of Trump, and it ain’t pretty. They wouldn’t put a scatological cartoon like this in an American paper:
And there was a closet whose legend will be familiar to many:
North Hinksey is an old and lovely village, founded in the 10th century, with many attractive houses, like this one:
The local church dates back to at least the 12th century:
Can you spot the robin below? It’s not the American robin but, as my host said, a “proper robin.” The species is the European robin, (Erithacus rubecula). Its call was beautiful.
This gorgeous bird, easy to spot, is of course the blue tit, Cyanistes caeruleus. Among other things, the species is famous for having learned to open milk bottles on people’s doorsteps and drink the cream, a trait that was culturally inherited. Now the behavior is of no adaptive significance since I don’t think milk is delivered to doors any longer.
And I was very excited to see my first cat in Britain, a hefty tabby in someone’s allotment. It walked like a tiger, and would not approach me. Still, the cats have been almost completely absent since I arrived here. For a while my hypothesis was that there were no cats in Britain.
